Red anthurium

One of my gifts this year was the Canon 500D close up lens. I put it on my list because I’ve been interested in getting into macro photography for a while, but the macro lenses are quite expensive. This close up lens is a relatively inexpensive way to introduce yourself to macro photography and attaches to your existing lens just like a filter – it screws on.

So on Christmas day I started playing with it and took some shots of the table decorations. The picture at the top of my Xmas post was one of my first attempts and this one above, another. I’m quite pleased, but really need to get out with it (if only it would stop raining here!). In reviewing this, I wish I’d put the focus on the stamen rather than on the leaf.

Aloha Christmas…

We had a really good christmas this year and Santa was good to all of us. We somehow managed to get ourselves onto the right list – a clerical error perhaps?

As reported by Tom, the weather throughout the Xmas period was very wet and stormy. Not just rain but thunder and lightning also, which kept us awake for most of Christmas night. We were getting up to 1-2 inches of rain per hour at the height of the downpour. I didn’t realise how bad it was until I read the following on the weather underground web page:

… Record daily maximum rainfall set at Hilo Airport…

A record rainfall of 9.84 inches was set at the Hilo Airport
yesterday. This breaks the old record of 3.56 inches set in 1981.

That’s almost THREE TIMES more rain than the previous record! But at least we on the Big Island kept our power. On Oahu  power was lost last night and as I write this at around midday, power is only just coming back to parts of the island.

The reason this concerns us is that we leave for Oahu in just a couple of hours. As a surprise present this Xmas, I got tickets for us to go and see a performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony by the HSO at the Neal Blaisdell Concert Hall. One day soon, I may show you the picture of the moment when I made my wife cry on Christmas morning!

 

High-key, Low-key

These are two photographs that I took of my models back in September. I was playing with the images in Lightroom today when I had the idea to try and do something with differing styles of black and white imagery.

The image on the left is supposed to represent high-key and that on the right is low-key. According to Tom Ang, high-key is when the “image’s key tone is high”. I’m not sure that it is high enough, but I do like the way it looks (and that’s what’s important, right?). He also says that high-key is best obtained in-camera, which is clearly not what I’m doing here – I’m nowhere near proficient enough to have my best ideas at “the moment it clicks“, and that is why I love Lightroom so, it allows me to be creative post-clickus. The image to the right is low-key when the image’s key tone is… you get it by now!

What I was interested by is that in both of these quite simple techniques the effect is the same. You are drawn into the image, to its focus, where the photographer wants you to be and that is the models’ eyes (in this case, but it could also be a cup cake – and it is just coincidence that in both these cases I have both model and cup cakes as my photographic inspirations).

Both images were taken on the same day under the same (or very similar) lighting conditions. All processing was done in Lightroom, no need for photoshop.

Snow on Mauna Loa

When it does snow, we talk a lot about the snow on Mauna Kea as it’s more accessible (and perhaps more visible) from the main populated areas on the  Big Island. However, Mauna Loa also gets a decent sprinkling of snow as this picture shows (taken last week).

Summit Sunrise #3

Another Mauna Kea summit sunrise image – well, I said that this might turn into a series. This was a set of 4 shots taken in a square pattern from the back of the JCMT looking westward. Put together in hugin and cropped and tweaked in Lightroom. Yep, I’m ‘hugin-happy’ too!

As the sun rises to the east, the shadow of Mauna Kea is cast to the west. Seeing the shadow of the mountain you are standing on always gives me a sense of perspective, about how large this mountain really is.

In the corner you can see three dishes from the SMA array. There are some fascinating features and range of colours in this image, and I quite like the composition. But note the dark streak across the image from top left down towards the apex of Mauna Kea’s shadow. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but I’m speculating that its the shadow itself from the summit which was behind and above me when I took this.

A software solution for colour blindness?

As someone who suffers a bit(*) from colour blindness, and who spends most of his working day surrounded by people who come up with software solutions for (almost) any problem we come across, I found the following post by John Nack interesting. The latest version of Photoshop, CS4,  (something that I don’t have, don’t need and can’t afford!) has got a neat feature which is supposed to help those suffering from colour blindness. Here’s the post on John Nack’s blog, and here’s a screenshot showing the feature in action:

This new feature is based on research conducted in Japan, called Colour Universal Design (CUD). As you can see, the two most common types of colour blindness are weakness to the red part of the spectrum (protanopia) and weakness to the green part of the spectrum (deuteranopia). By understanding these spectral weaknesses the software can adjust the colours on the screen to better match those seen by people with normal vision. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but CS4 is basically applying different colour gamuts through the colour profiles, and they in turn must be adjusting the brightness/saturation of the different colours to compensate for the loss in sensitivity to certain colours. If anybody reading this has a better understanding, please leave me a comment!

With something like 10% of the male population believed to be colour blind (female colour blindness runs at about 0.5%) this could be an important breakthrough and the CUD organisation has in mind several applications from mobile phones, to ticket and ATM machines where you would tell the device/machine what type of colour blindness you have before you use it.

Alternatively, you could do what I do and ask your wife (as I’m sure 10% of the married male population do)!

For the record, I have slight(*) deuteranopia. In the image above, the greens in the deuteranopia corrected image look vivid to me, whereas they look pinkish in the regular image. (Please tell me that they’re supposed to be green in the regular image!!)

* depending on who you ask (i.e. ‘the wife’).

Summit Sunrise #2

I took this image about a year and a half ago. I was still shooting Jpegs then rather than RAW, so you can see a bit of banding in the sky – the tonal range in jpegs is much more compressed compared to what you can achieve with RAW. I like the way the silhouette worked out.

On the ridge you can see (left-to-right): IRTF, CFHT, Gemini, UH88, UKIRT and the little blip of the old 24-inch telescope. If you click on the image you’ll see that there’s quite a bit of detail present. You can see the guard rails on the road to the left of the IRTF and the weather tower between CFHT and Gemini.

I think this might turn into a series…

The Big Picture

The Big Picture excels at reporting news from around the world using the power of high quality photography to convey thought-provoking messages on the state of our world and society today and yesterday. Some of the best photography I have seen has been on this site and if you consider the war-torn and riot-ridden situations that these photo-journalists often find themselves in, that is even more remarkable.

Frossie pointed out to me today’s picture post of the riots in Greece these past two weeks. As someone with Greek heritage I found these images difficult to take in. I think everybody understands the grief and anger at the needless loss of a 15-year old boy’s life, but the reaction just somehow seems so over the top. Now I am left wondering “And now what? What was achieved? What was the point of that?”

I despair of the Greeks sometimes – to look at this and then to think that our ancestors helped to bring civilisation to this world…

Lightroom 2.2 now available

The Lightroom News blog has just announced that the latest update of what is arguably one of the best photo management tools in the business has just been released. You can grab the latest update from these OS specific links – Mac, Win – although if you have the program already it should automatically prompt you to download the update as soon as you launch the software.

As well as the usual inclusion of new RAW converters for the latest camera models (including the drooly Canon EOS 5D MkII), there are improvement in performance (especially when using the adjustment brushes) and the final release of the new Camera profiles which are proving a hit amongst users.

I’m observing at the JCMT again and don’t get back down until Thursday, so I will have to wait until then to upgrade.

Film vs Digital – Gadget Show style

When I was back in the UK one of my favourite geek-and-gadgetary shows was The Gadget Show (nothing to do with Suzi Perry’s leather boots – not much anyway!). I was reading Jao’s blog today and noticed that he had a link to it, where the Gadget Show team have undertaken a, literally, huge comparison between film and digital camera technologies. The video clip is below. The comparison was between the full-format Nikon D700 and the Nikon F5. The team tried to keep the experiment/comparison as controlled as possible using the same lenses on both cameras, shooting in identical conditions with the same pro photographer and using the same printing service. Oh and the print, wow! It took 2 days (yes two days!) to print out the 17 metre tall images, big enough to drape down the side of a building.

Here’s the video (and remember, we’re interested in the comparison between film and digital and not Suzi Perry’s leather cat suit).

Digital wins out (clearly) but, as Jao points out, I wonder whether real portrait or landscape film photographers would have been using ISO400 in this situation. I would have liked to have seen comparisons at ISO100 or even ISO50.